Writer Identity In Chinese Linguistic Doctoral Dissertations In English

This thesis reports a study of writer identity as it is expressed throughself-reference in the academic writing of L2doctoral candidates in China. It examinesthe occurrences of self-reference items and discusses the discourse functions of firstperson pronouns in twenty doctoral dissertations and compares with these findings ofprevious scholars in writer identity constructed by native English speakers in Englishacademic writing. My methodology is both quantitative and qualitative. The purposeof the present study is thus to see how identity is constructed by academic writersthrough use of self-reference, why Chinese academic writers choose to refer tothemselves the way they do, what this might suggest to the relationship betweenlanguage and identity. Besides, it is hoped that the findings of the study may be of useto the teaching of English academic writing in the Chinese context.The statistic data reveals that Chinese doctoral students in linguistics have indeedemployed a certain number of first person pronouns and other self-mention items forauthorial reference. However, doctoral students in linguistics are found to use the firstperson pronouns much more often than their use of other self-mentions. Among theauthor identities realized by I and we to self-refer, the author as the recounter and theauthor as the architect is the majority. That is, Chinese doctoral candidates seem to useI and we to write, organize, structure and outline the text and to describe or recount thevarious steps of the research process. There exists difference between Chineselinguistic doctoral candidates and English-speaking linguistic expert writers on the useof self-mentions in academic writing. Chinese doctoral candidates in linguisticschoose to deviate from the semantic pronoun-referent alignment, using both the firstperson singular and the first person plural to self-refer, with the first person pluralbeing the majority and being used to create a distance between themselves and theirclaims while English-speaking linguistic expert writers prefer to use only the firstperson singular to self-refer which conveys a closer and stronger authorial presence.In addition, possible explanations are provided. The reason for the phenomenon that Chinese can not appropriately use some of the first person pronouns to self-refer isthe influence of the Chinese academic writing convention the theory of collectivisticcultures and social orientation of Chinese people in self-representation, the influenceof the conflicting ideas of first person pronouns in academic writing, the influence ofpersonality and other possible explanations.